This interdisciplinary volume offers a powerful critique of how social structures and relations as well as ideologies shape workplaces, labour markets, and households in contemporary Canada. Contributors dissect recent transformations in work and expose the uncertainty, insecurity, and instability that increasingly characterize both paid and unpaid work.

This edited volume focuses on the intersection of time and globalization, as manifested across a variety of economic, political, cultural, and environmental contexts. Since David Harvey’s influential characterization of globalization as "time-space compression", ample research has looked at the spatial aspect of the phenomenon, yet few have focused on globalization’s temporal aspects. Meanwhile, other publications have analysed problems of speed, acceleration, and the commodification of time, but while it often serves as the implicit or explicit backdrop for these studies of time, globalization is not investigated as a problem or a question in its own right. In response, this volume develops these conversations to consider how time shapes globalization, and how globalization affects our experience of time. The interplay between varying aspects of the human experiences of time and globalization requires the type of interdisciplinary approach that this volume takes. The contributors advance an understanding of global time(s) as an arena of contestation, with social, political, ecological, and cultural implications for human and other lives. In considering the diverse valences of time and globalization, they illuminate problems as well as possibilities. Topics covered include emerging infectious diseases, temporal sovereignty, worker exploitation and resistance, chronobiology, energy politics, activism and hope, and literary and cinematic representations of counter-temporalities, offering a rich and varied account of global times. This volume will be of great interest to students and researchers from a range of disciplines, including anthropology, cultural studies, globalization, international relations, literary studies, political science, social theory, and sociology.

Drawing on findings from interviews done with 32 families living in cities across Canada, Ranson challenges dominant understandings of mothering and fathering by looking closely at how couples who have opted for less traditional divisions of labour negotiate their parental and household responsibilities. Included are interviews with breadwinner mothers and caregiver fathers, and with dual-earner couples, both heterosexual and same-sex, who struggle to share equally in the nurture and support of their families. A central claim of the book is that, to the extent that both parents are equally involved in hands-on caregiving, they tend to become, over time, functionally interchangeable and move away from "mothering" and "fathering," and toward parenting. Against the Grain offers us an excellent opportunity to examine how social change happens at the forefront of family life.

In hard times, you can either panic, decline, or grow. Which do you choose to do? This is not a time to tweak your church budget. It is not a time to slash and burn it indiscriminately across the board. Nor is it the time to hunker down in the bunker and wait things out. Now is the time is exercise wisdom and to act strategically. In fact, it's a great time to be the church. People need us to live out our mission as radically as we can possibly imagine. This book will help you make wise decisions about how to weather the economic storm and emerge on the other side of it a much stronger congregation. It’s a simple book with a simple message: you don’t get to choose when you go through hard times, only how you respond to them.

This book of personal essays by over forty women and men who founded women’s studies in Canada and Québec explores feminist activism on campus in the pivotal decade of 1966-76. The essays document the emergence of women’s studies as a new way of understanding women, men, and society, and they challenge some current preconceptions about “second wave” feminist academics. The contributors explain how the intellectual and political revolution begun by small groups of academics—often young, untenured women—at universities across Canada contributed to social progress and profoundly affected the way we think, speak, behave, understand equality, and conceptualize the academy and an academic career. A contextualizing essay documents the social, economic, political, and educational climate of the time, and a concluding chapter highlights the essays’ recurring themes and assesses the intellectual and social transformation that their authors helped set in motion. The essays document the appalling sexism and racism some women encounter in seeking admission to doctoral studies, in hiring, in pay, and in establishing the legitimacy of feminist perspectives in the academy. They reveal sources of resistance, too, not only from colleagues and administrators but from family members and from within the self. In so doing they provide inspiring examples of sisterly support and lifelong friendship.

FELICITY - HARD TIMES, HAPPY DAYS is a tribute to the courage, spirit, and kindness of a remarkable woman. She and her family were neither giants of industry nor people of singular accomplishments, but they, like millions of others like them, who struggled to survive hard times, were the back bone of this growing nation. Hard work and family bonds helped them make ends meet and get by through difficult times. They represent the indomitable spirit that built America. While the book is about overcoming difficulties and tragic events well before our more comfortable modern age, it is a book of hope, filled with delightful stories of growing up when life was simpler, and countless humorous adventures in the struggle to simply survive in more rugged times. Felicity and her family’s story of hope, struggle and endurance during the difficult years between 1903 and WWII will serve as an inspiration to anyone who reads the book. For despite those difficult years she never lost her sense of fun and adventure, and enjoyed life to its fullest - always maintaining a half-cup-full attitude. ----------------- This book is a tapestry of the life and times of the people who came before us. I could hear my family in your words, and watch them struggle with both success and failure. Felicity - Hard Times, Happy Days is a heartwarming story about a woman we can all relate to and love. She had the kind of courage, determination and love of family that helped shape our nation ... it’s a wonderful story! Brian Ratty Author of the Dutch Clarke series

To cut costs and maximize profits, hospitals in the United States and many other countries are outsourcing such tasks as cleaning and food preparation to private contractors. In Cleaning Up, the first book to examine this transformation in the healthcare industry, Dan Zuberi looks at the consequences of outsourcing from two perspectives: its impact on patient safety and its role in increasing socioeconomic inequality. Drawing on years of field research in Vancouver, Canada as well as data from hospitals in the U.S. and Europe, he argues that outsourcing has been disastrous for the cleanliness of hospitals—leading to an increased risk of hospital-acquired infections, a leading cause of severe illness and death—as well as for the effective delivery of other hospital services and the workers themselves. Zuberi’s interviews with the low-wage workers who keep hospitals running uncover claims of exposure to near-constant risk of injury and illness. Many report serious concerns about the quality of the work due to understaffing, high turnover, poor training and experience, inadequate cleaning supplies, and on-the-job injuries. Zuberi also presents policy recommendations for improving patient safety by reducing the risk of hospital-acquired infection and ameliorating the work conditions and quality of life of hospital support workers. He makes the case that hospital outsourcing exemplifies the trend towards “low-road” service-sector jobs that threatens to undermine society’s social health, as well as the physical health and well-being of patients in health care settings globally.

Coming of age in the rugged and unforgiving Southwest may not suit the faint-of-heart, but it is the perfect landscape for a compelling and humorous memoir of a lad who endured a mid-1900s cowboy upbringing in rural Arizona and New Mexico. Growing Up Cowboy chronicles the foibles and fortunes of its author, Ralph Reynolds (a.k.a. Luna Kid), in an engaging and heartfelt fashion. From wrangling ornery critters to finding first love, the Luna Kid confesses all and regales the reader with vivid stories imparted with an abundance of wit and humility. So saddle up and ride along as the Luna Kid introduces you to a helping of the Southwest's fascinating terrain and colorful characters. And along the way shows you the irreverent side of adolescence adventure and the human side of growing up cowboy. Growing Up Cowboy can be found on the shelves of the National Cowboy Museum Library, and selections from the book have been reprinted by the National Cowboy Hall of Fame.

Hard Times is the name of a town in the barren hills of the Dakota Territory. To this town there comes one day one of the reckless sociopaths who wander the West to kill and rape and pillage. By the time he is through and has ridden off, Hard Times is a smoking ruin. The de facto mayor, Blue, takes in two survivors of the carnage–a boy, Jimmy, and a prostitute, Molly, who has suffered unspeakably–and makes them his provisional family. Blue begins to rebuild Hard Times, welcoming new settlers, while Molly waits with vengeance in her heart for the return of the outlaw. Here is E. L. Doctorow’s debut novel, a searing allegory of frontier life that sets the stage for his subsequent classics. “A forceful, credible story of cowardice and evil.” –The Washington Post “We are caught up with these people as real human beings.” –Chicago Sun-Times “Dramatic and exciting.” –The New York Times “Terse and powerful.” –Newsweek “A taut, bloodthirsty read.” –The Times Literary Supplement “A superb piece of fiction.” –The New Republic

This book is about: • surviving when you’re broke • how happy people think – and how you can be like them • liking yourself before you lose that extra weight • persevering after you get the sack • being happy before you meet your dream partner – and when they become a ‘learning experience!’ Filled with Andrew’s charming cartoons, and inspiring stories of people who have lost everything they had or almost been beaten by alcohol, illness, abuse or outrageous misfortune, Happiness in Hard Times shows us how we too can find our way through the pain to the contentment that seems out of reach.

Arthur Rothstein, Russell Lee, John Vachon, and Marion Post Wolcott became some of the United States' best-known photographers through their pictures of Depression-era America. Their assignment, as one of their associates described it, was to have "a long look at the whole vast, complicated rural U.S. landscape with all that was built on it and all those who built and wrecked and worked in it and bore kids and dragged them up and played games and paraded and picnicked and suffered and died and were buried in it." In Montana the four photographers traveled to forty of the state's fifty-six counties, creating a rich record of the many facets of the Depression and recovery: rural and urban, agricultural and industrial, work and play, hard times and the promise of a brighter future. The photographers captured the dignity of Montanans as they struggled to scratch out livings from dried-up fields, nurture families in the shadows of Butte head frames, and foster communities on the vast expanses of the northern plains. Hope in Hard Times, features over 140 Farm Security Administration photographs to illustrate the story of the Great Depression in Montana and the experiences of the photographers who documented it. Today these striking images, from cities like Butte to small towns like Terry, present an unforgettable portrait of a little-studied period in the history of Montana. Selected from the Farm Security Administration Collection at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., the photographs in Hope in Hard Times offer viewers an unparalleled look at life in Montana in the years preceding the United States' entry into World War II.

There is widespread agreement among large segments of western society that we are living in a period of hard times. At first glance such a belief might seem exceedingly odd. After all, persons in western society find themselves living in a time of unprecedented material abundance. Hunger and disease, evils all too familiar to the members of earlier generations, although far from eradicated from modern life, are plainly on the wane. Persons alive today can look forward to healthier, longer, and more comfortable lives than those of their grand parents. Nevertheless, the feeling that life today is especially difficult is rampant in government, in the media, in popular books, and in academic circles. Western society is perceived in many quarters as wracked by crises of all sorts-of faith, of power, of authority, of social turmoil, of declining quality in workmanship and products, and of a general intellectual malaise afflicting both those on the Left and the Right. A tone of crisis permeates the language of public life. Editorials in major newspapers are full of dire warnings about the dangers of unbridled egoism, avarice and greed, and the risks and horrors of pollution, overpopulation, the arms race, crime, and indulgent lifestyles.

Ray Golarz paints a revealing pathway into the lives of a Depression era immigrant community. He takes the reader aboard a journey via the very early American game of football. Once aboard, the reader is introduced to a team of young semi-pro Polish football players, along with their friends, families, ethnic customs, and religious ways, then drawn into a community struggling to survive the Depression's challenges and maintain their unique identity in this newly-adopted country. This account has it all: football games filled with action, emotion, strategizing, and gritty determination. And like those who actually came to see the games, you will find it delightfully easy to walk along with family and friends, coming from all over their neighborhood, to stand or take a seat on a make-shift bench. Join in the singing of the National Anthem, agonize over plays gone wrong, and walk with them over to Wusic's gas station to gather and celebrate after game victories. Ah, but stick around. There's more. Before, during and between games and seasons, you can come to team meetings, share a Christmas Eve ethnic meal, and attend a Christmas Eve Midnight Mass. If you can wake up at two o'clock in the morning, you will be taken on a night trip to collect coal along the railroad tracks. Then in early morning, go off to Wusic's for coffee and a log in the pot-bellied stove. And you can get a close look at the Depression on a national level as you join Lefty who goes “on the bum” hitting the rails, driven by curiosity and want for food at home. Meet World War I vets on their way to Washington for promised bonuses, walk to Niagara Falls, and take a cot in a New York City mission.

The contributors of this text discuss broad questions of media and politics, offer nuanced analyses of change in journalism, and undertake detailed examinations of the use of web-based media in shaping political and social movements. The chapters include not only essays but also interviews with journalists and media activists.